Wolverine: Weapon X

by Marc Cerasini

  “As a researcher, and an esteemed member of the academic community both here in Canada and in the United States, Dr. Cornelius is known to us all as a revolutionary thinker within the field of immunology,” the dean declared. “But Abraham Cornelius refused to allow his accomplishments to end there. He returned to his native country and received a degree in molecular biology and the first-ever doctorate in the field of biomedical nanotechnology.”

  Amid all the cheers and applause, Cornelius felt humbled by the effusive outpouring of support from his peers.

  “On this momentous day,” the dean continued, “Dr. Cornelius has returned to our school of medicine, to outline a series of new techniques and technologies for the suppression of the body’s immune system during transplant procedures previously considered impossible. It is my privilege and pleasure to introduce to you, Dr. Abraham B. Cornelius.”

  Cornelius rose, nodding at the warm applause, then, standing before an international audience comprised of specialists in the fields of transplant surgery, neurological function, and bionic limb replacement, he presented his theories.

  “I believe that the threat of tissue rejection that followed many transplant procedures will soon be a problem of the past…”

  For the next eighty-five minutes, he discussed several nanomedical devices that he’d developed—along with innovative surgical procedures that would open up new avenues in the repair and replacement of damaged organs, muscles, even nerve tissue.

  “Soon, programmable microscopic devices injected inside the human body will fight infection, destroy cancerous tissue without damaging healthy cells, and wage battle against the body’s own immune system after transplant surgery.”

  When the seminar ended, practically every member of the audience rushed the stage to extol the limitless potential of Cornelius’s groundbreaking research. Many, including the dean of medicine himself, urged Cornelius to begin testing human subjects as soon as possible.

  “Oh, well, that will have to wait,” Cornelius told the audience during an impromptu question-and-answer session. “I’m not sure I’m ready for clinical trials quite yet. Perhaps in a year. More likely two. I’m still trying to complete the animal testing. Then I’ll have to correlate my findings, write a new paper, and present what I hope will be positive results. Of course, there is also the ever present issue of funding—or the lack thereof.”

  His colleagues smiled at that, having faced the same hurdle. Then Cornelius touched the shoulder of the woman who stood at his side. She smiled and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  “And because my former assistant, Dr. Madeline Vetri, has just consented to be my wife, I will also have to pencil in a wedding and a honeymoon. I’m told by the bride—to-be that attendance at both is mandatory.”

  Madeline laughed and poked his arm.

  Opposites attract, they say, and Dr. Cornelius and his fiancée could not have seemed more different. She was French-Canadian, he a U.S. citizen of Irish-Jewish descent. Plain-faced and slightly paunchy, no one would ever mistake Abraham Cornelius for a movie star, while Madeline Vetri was easily the most attractive woman in any room. Her long, lustrous hair was raven black, in contrast to Cornelius’s own tangled brown mop, and she was as slim and tail as he was short and stocky—even in low heels she stood nearly a head taller than him. And while his manner was quiet and reserved—a harsh critic might even say dull—Madeline’s every gesture brimmed with grace and vivacious energy.

  More applause and more congratulations greeted the joyous announcement—then ceased abruptly. At the entrance to the auditorium, a buzz of excitement erupted.

  “It’s the Professor,” someone murmured and all eyes turned.

  “Welcome, sir…” called the dean with a respectful nod as the man they called the Professor glided down the center aisle.

  It was as if the Red Sea parted. Physicians, researchers, academics—all stepped back in quiet awe as the Professor passed. Finally, the man halted in front of Dr. Cornelius.

  “I’ve read your paper,” he said without preamble, and without extending his hand. Behind his angular glasses, the Professor’s eyes were unreadable, dead flat.

  “Your work shows potential, Doctor. And much promise for future scientific pursuits. But I must concur with my colleagues—”

  The Professor’s cool gaze took in the woman at Cornelius’s side.

  “—when they say you should put aside any … distractions … you may have in your personal life and concentrate solely on clinical trials. Anything else would be counterproductive, a waste of time.”

  His declaration complete, the Professor licked his thin lips. To Cornelius, the gesture seemed vaguely reptilian.

  At his side, he felt his fiancée tense. He squeezed her hand, turned his head to meet her eyes, reassure her. The Professor’s statement was galling—but when Cornelius turned back to demand an apology he was gone.

  “Good God, who was that ridiculous man?” Cornelius asked the dean, who guided him away from the others before answering.

  Dr. Cornelius was shocked to learn the Professor’s identity. Forgiving the insult to his fiancée would not be easy, yet he couldn’t help but feel uplifted. His research had just been endorsed by one of the most brilliant scientists since Albert Einstein.

  * * * * *

  “Good morning, Dr. Cornelius. Are we set to begin?”

  Revived from his reverie, Cornelius managed a wan smile. “Good morning, Professor. Yes, I believe everything has gone quite smoothly It certainly looked that way from the observation booth.”

  The Professor stood, emotionless and unreadable, his hands clutched behind his back. “And your nanochips are ready for injection?”

  Cornelius directed the Professor’s attention to the tank.

  “Right there, Professor … inside that blue container.”

  He pointed to a teardrop-shaped metal jar roughly the size of an average household aerosol can. It was attached to a long injection needle situated among a cluster of them located on the ceiling of the holding tank.

  “Should we begin the process?”

  “Whenever you are ready, Professor. The nanochips will be injected directly into the heart simultaneously, so the microscopic devices will be dispersed throughout the body quickly. The chips should fuse with the subject’s bone in less than a minute.”

  The Professor barely nodded, then drifted away to interrogate another member of the team. Like yes-men around a winning candidate, the crowd followed. Only Carol Hines remained at Cornelius’s side. For the first time since they’d met, she showed a glimmer of interest in something that did not involve her REM machine.

  “An injection straight into his heart?” she asked. “What are you pumping into Subject X, anyway?”

  “A silicon—based chip with a coded memory—several million of them, in fact. Each one creates a microscopic valve that will adhere to the tiny sinuses in the bone. The valves are self-sustaining and can even use nutrients absorbed by the body to replace the ones that malfunction or wear out.”

  “You mean they reproduce?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I see … And your goal with this?”

  “Well, the first objective is to sheathe the subject’s skeleton with adamantium steel, to increase bone mass and tensile strength. But because bones are living organisms—and vital organs in their own right, since bone marrow manufactures blood—they cannot be completely coated with steel, or the bones would die and so would the subject.”

  Carol Hines nodded. “You need pores—holes that will allow blood to pass through the steel barrier?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the nanotechnology creates these pores?”

  “More accurately, it replaces them,” Cornelius explained. “Human bones already have tiny pores that permit fluids to pass. My chips will seek those out and replace their function once the adamantium bonding process has been completed.”

  Despite his reservations about the project and his su
spicions about the Professor, Cornelius was astonished to find that the work of the last few days had stimulated some of his old love for scientific discovery. And it didn’t hurt that the usually reserved Ms. Hines had suddenly taken an interest in his area of expertise. It had been so long since he felt needed.

  “Well, I have my doubts,” said a loud voice in a decidedly hostile tone. “In fact, Dr. Cornelius, I fear your technology will do more harm than good. Why are you so certain that these nanochips of yours will not degrade the integrity of my adamantium bone sheathing?”

  Dr. Cornelius met Dr. Hendry’s skeptical gaze with a very stern one of his own.

  “For one thing,” Cornelius replied, “my nanochips can withstand the destructive power of white-hot molten adamantium because they are actually three times more resilient than the steel itself So the question you should really be asking, Dr. Hendry is will your adamantium degrade the integrity of my nanotechnology?”

  Hendry stood his ground. “What do you conclude?”

  “An unequivocal no. Why? Because these two very complex processes are complementary—”

  “Complementary or contradictory?” snapped Hendry.

  “—which means that despite their obvious differences, the two technologies will work together to achieve a single goal—to make the subject’s bones virtually indestructible.”

  “I’m reassured to hear you say that,” Hendry replied, his tone still skeptical. “Some of us here in Department K have devoted years of our lives to this project. We want nothing more than for the Weapon X project to succeed.”

  Cornelius raised an eyebrow. There was the resistance. Right there. He was the new guy, the star exchange student from lands unfamiliar. He had come into their midst with little warning, carrying a briefcase of breakthrough research—and they resented it, to a man.

  “Surely, you understand our trepidation,” Hendry continued. “After all, we wouldn’t want our efforts—all of our hard work—to be jeopardized by the use of a reckless and untested technological process devised by a … a newcomer.”

  Cornelius tried not to laugh out loud. Newcomer indeed. “The Professor has expressed the utmost confidence in my technology,” he said evenly.

  Hendry moved to reply, but was interrupted by a booming voice from a loudspeaker.

  “The bonding process will begin in thirty minutes. All personnel take their positions and commence prebonding procedures.”

  Dr. Hendry instantly wheeled around and strode away. Dr. Cornelius had intended to escort Ms. Hines to her workstation, which was located next to his. But when he turned in her direction, he found nobody there.

  * * * * *

  In truth, Cornelius wondered why he even had a workstation during this procedure—and so close to the Professor’s own that it made him uncomfortable. It was like having the front row seat in a class taught by a particularly exacting teacher.

  It’s not like I’m drowning in work…

  It had taken Dr. Cornelius all of five minutes to interface his computer with the biological monitors embedded in the subject’s body. Now, with nearly twenty minutes to go before the bonding process commenced, he had absolutely nothing to do.

  For Cornelius, most of the really intensive labor took place during the distillation of the liquid silicon solution, and the chemical processing that crystallized the substance, which helped encode the programming onto the molecules themselves. Once the nanotechnology was formulated and vacuum-sealed in a sterile vessel, Cornelius’s job was pretty much over.

  After the nanochips were injected into Subject X, they were out of anyone’s control. In the bloodstream, their internal programming would take over. All Dr. Cornelius could do at that point was monitor their progress.

  So why am I here? Not even the inestimable Dr. Hendry—the Professor’s own right-hand man—has such a choice seat for this critical experiment.

  Of course, Dr. Cornelius was aware of one skill he possessed that would prove useful. If his nanochips completely failed, he could unleash a synthetic hormone of his own invention into the subject’s body.

  This substance would essentially “kill” the nanochips, which would then be filtered out of the body by the liver, to be eliminated like waste matter. If that happened, it would spell certain doom for the experiment—and for Subject X.

  Without holes in the poor bastard’s bones, he will die. Slowly, painfully, his skeleton will asphyxiate while the rest of his body withers from a dearth of whole blood.

  But why dwell on the negative?

  Cornelius never wanted to be a part of this research. His intention always had been to help humanity to cure disease—not to create some kind of superweapon. Not to turn a man into a killing machine. An unstoppable tool of war.

  Unconsciously, Cornelius began to massage his temples as a pain bloomed behind his eyes.

  How the hell did I end up with these people? Doing this kind of work? Trapped in this place?

  * * * * *

  After the triumphant conference at McGill University’s School of Medicine, Cornelius’s time had been absorbed by his intense research and, of course, his wedding. He had put the unpleasant encounter with the Professor out of his mind until the second day of his honeymoon, when a very expensive bottle of Taittinger’s Blanc de Blanc was delivered to his stateroom aboard the cruise ship Delphi.

  “BEST WISHES FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE,” read the card.

  It was signed by the Professor.

  Recalling the man’s negative reaction to his pending marriage, Cornelius was surprised to learn that the Professor was capable of such a magnanimous gesture.

  He considered mentioning the gift to Madeline, but the memory of the man’s distasteful conduct at the conference stopped him. Cornelius tore up the card and flushed it down the toilet. Later that night, they celebrated their marriage by finishing the Professor’s bottle of champagne in a single sitting.

  During that extraordinary week, Madeline Vetri—Cornelius conceived their only child. A boy was born nine months later, christened Paul Phillip Cornelius after Madeline’s father, a noted architect in his native Quebec.

  Then came the agony, and there began a downward spiral. A disease that robbed him of all his joy, and the madness that resulted in murder…

  Half a year later, after the indictment on a charge of double homicide had been handed down, Cornelius, rather than face a prison cell or executioner, became a fugitive. His lawyer had convinced the judge that bail was uncalled for, that an esteemed member of the medical community was not a flight risk.

  But Cornelius fled just the same.

  Months later, he’d begun to live what he thought was an anonymous life in a small trailer park outside of Syracuse, New York, when he received a package. No stamps on the outside, no postmark, either—which meant that the plain brown manila envelope had been stuffed into his mailbox by hand while he was working the graveyard shift at a local medical supply warehouse. The label was addressed to Ted Abrams—the name he was living under at the time—but when he peeked inside, it became obvious that the unknown sender knew his true identity.

  Cornelius’s first impulse was to hide from the truth. He hurled the envelope into a corner. With shaking hands, he brewed his morning coffee, toasted two stale slices of bread. Temporarily soothed by the caffeine, he retrieved the envelope and spilled all of its contents on the table next to his plate.

  Inside were more than a dozen newspaper clippings culled from wire service stories that had been filed over the past eighteen months. The stories all covered the same subject—the phenomenal rise and precipitous descent of Dr. Abraham B. Cornelius, from esteemed immunologist to fugitive double-murderer.

  The envelope also contained a note written in large, almost childlike block letters:

  YOU ARE BEING WATCHED. AT 11:00 PM. TONIGHT YOU MUST BE WAITING IN FRONT OF THE MAIN MUNICIPAL LIBRARY IN BUFFALO, NEW YORK IF YOU ATTEMPT TO FLEE BEFORE THIS MEETING TAKES PLACE YOUR LOCATION WILL BE LEAKED TO THE AUTHORITIES. IF YOU FAIL T
O ATTEND THIS MEETING YOUR LOCATION WILL BE LEAKED TO THE AUTHORITIES. IF YOU AGREE TO THESE TERMS CALL THIS NUMBER NOW.

  A telephone number had been scrawled in red ink below the message. Of course, there was no signature.

  Is it blackmail? But why not just demand money? What’s the reason for this secret rendezvous crap? Why the hell do I have to drive to Buffalo for a goddamn shakedown?

  He stared at the remains of his morning coffee, cooling in the cup, the butter congealing atop the dry bread on his plate. Hesitantly, Cornelius lifted the receiver and dialed. A phone rang once. Then a male voice answered with two words.

  “Wise decision.”

  The line went dead. Cornelius slammed the table with his fist. Enraged by the crass manipulation, and at being treated in such a disdainful manner, he immediately redialed the number.

  This time, he got a recorded message stating that the number was no longer in service. He tried a second call, a third, a fourth—with the same results.

  That afternoon, as wan yellow rays streamed through the dirty windows of his trailer, Cornelius tossed and turned in his narrow bunk. At five o’clock, he rose. Plenty of daylight was still left in the summer afternoon, and Cornelius weighed his options over another pot of coffee.

  Finally, decision made, he showered, shaved, packed a small bag with a few necessities, and left the trailer without a second glance. He was due at his warehouse job in an hour, but he would not show up tonight, r ever again. Cornelius knew that no matter what happened at this forced meeting, he would never return to Syracuse.

  As he drove to Buffalo, Cornelius noticed a storm was brewing in the darkening sky. By the time he arrived, the clouds had cut loose and the city turned gray under the gloomy downpour.

  While waiting under a lamppost in the rain, Cornelius heard the clock on a nearby steeple strike eleven. He looked up to see a figure emerge from the watery curtain. Cornelius wondered if it was the person he was supposed to meet, or just a bystander.